License oxygen indicator technology.

Canada's Guelph Food Technology Center (GFTC) and scientists intend to promote, license and further develop the oxygen indicator technology developed by Dr. Lindsay Mulholland and his team at the GFTC. Investigators are interested in talking with companies that may see benefits to licensing or developing this technology.

This advance allows you to accurately estimate oxygen permeation and therefore the shelf life of products packaged in semi-permeable, rigid or flexible packages. Other methods exist for estimations of this kind, but they all suffer from some or all of a variety of deficiencies:

* Long measurement times;

* Large sample sizes required, especially if the method is destructive to the packaging material;

* Inadequate representations of populations--particularly of prototype samples;

* Poor correlations to product component degradation;

* Poor relationship to sensory results;

* Separation of components, such as caps, bottles and seals; and

* Poor relationship to real-world conditions.

The GFTC will continue to offer its cost-effective measurement capabilities to clients who want to evaluate package systems under development. Clients will be able to have several samples evaluated so they obtain data on mean values and standard deviations of effective oxygen transmission rates in a model system that is close to real-world packaged products. In addition to the liquid format of this indicator, an immobilized or gelled form is also available on a technical service basis to help clients investigate the weak (permeable) areas of rigid and flexible packages.

The GFTC and Mulholland are prepared to offer to a limited number of clients the opportunity to license this technology for ongoing testing within their own laboratories. A program of training in the application of the technology will be undertaken as part of the licensing process.

Further information. Terry Maurice, Guelph Food Technology Center, 88 McGilvray St., Guelph, Ontario N1G 2W1, Canada; phone: [phone]; fax: [phone]; email: [e-mail].